A quantum circuit is generalized to a nonunitary one whose constituents are nonunitary gates operated by quantum measurement. It is shown that a specific type of one-qubit nonunitary gates, the controlled-NOT gate, and all one-qubit unitary gates constitute a universal set of gates for the nonunitary quantum circuit, without the necessity of introducing ancilla qubits. A reversing measurement scheme is used to improve the probability of successful nonunitary gate operation. A quantum NAND gate and Abrams–Lloyd's nonlinear gate are analyzed as examples. Our nonunitary circuit can be used to reduce the qubit overhead needed to ensure fault-tolerant quantum computation.
A quantum circuit is generalized to a nonunitary one whose constituents are nonunitary gates operated by quantum measurement. It is shown that a specific type of one-qubit nonunitary gates, the controlled-NOT gate, and all one-qubit unitary gates constitute a universal set of gates for the nonunitary quantum circuit, without the necessity of introducing ancilla qubits. A reversing measurement scheme is used to improve the probability of successful nonunitary gate operation. A quantum NAND gate and Abrams–Lloyd's nonlinear gate are analyzed as examples. Our nonunitary circuit can be used to reduce the qubit overhead needed to ensure fault-tolerant quantum computation.
In [1] Gingrich and Williams extended the standard quantum circuit model of quantum computation to include gates that perform arbitrary linear, yet non-unitary, transformations of their input state. In this paper we use this theory to construct quantum circuits that perform desired non-unitary state transformations of the sort arising in lattice-based quantum search. Such n-qubit non-unitary gates cannot be achieved deterministically, but they can be achieved probabilistically using a single ancilla. Our approach is to use the n-qubit non-unitary gate to design an (n+1)-qubit Hamiltonian that can be seen to induce a suitable conditional dynamics such that whenever the output value of the ancilla qubit is measured and found to be |O>, then the remaining (unmeasured) n qubits will contain the desired non-unitary transform of the n-qubit input state. The scheme is necessarily probabilistic because we cannot force the measurement on the ancilla qubit to return the value we want. Fortunately, however, failed attempts are found to disturb the n-qubit input state very little. This allows us to re-use the result of successive “failed” attempts until the success condition is finally attained, and we give analytic expressions for the success probability and net fidelity in this case. By using our previous method for designing a quantum circuit for an arbitrary n-qubit gate in conjunction with our new probabilistic non-unitary procedure we are able to compute an explicit quantum circuit sufficient to implement an arbitrary linear, yet non-unitary, transformation of an input pure or mixed n-qubit state, using only a single copy of the input state. This allows us to extend the repertoire of computations that may be performed on a quantum computer, and in particular, gives the first explicit construction of the quantum circuits needed to perform some of the key operations arising in quantum lattice search.
In Section 1.3, we introduced the circuit model of (classical) computation. We restricted attention to reversible circuits since they can simulate any non-reversible circuit with modest overhead. This model can be generalized to a model of quantum circuits. In the quantum circuit model, we have logical qubits carried along ‘wires’, and quantum gates that act on the qubits. A quantum gate acting on n qubits has the input qubits carried to it by n wires, and n other wires carry the output qubits away from the gate. A quantum circuit is often illustrated schematically by a circuit diagram as shown in Figure 4.1. The wires are shown as horizontal lines, and we imagine the qubits propagating along the wires from left to right in time. The gates are shown as rectangular blocks. For convenience, we will restrict attention to unitary quantum gates (which are also reversible). Recall from Section 3.5.3 that non-unitary (non-reversible) quantum operations can be simulated by unitary (reversible) quantum gates if we allow the possibility of adding an ancilla and of discarding some output qubits. A circuit diagram describing a superoperator being implemented using a unitary operator is illustrated in Figure 4.2. In the example of Figure 4.1, the 4-qubit state |ψi⟩= |0⟩⊗ |0⟩⊗ |0⟩⊗ |0⟩ enters the circuit at the left (recall we often write this state as |ψi⟩ = |0⟩|0⟩|0⟩|0⟩ or |ψi⟩ = |0000⟩.) These qubits are processed by the gates U1, U2, U3, and U4. At the output of the circuit we have the collective (possibly entangled) 4-qubit state |ψf⟩. A measurement is then made of the resulting state. The measurement will often be a simple qubit-by-qubit measurement in the computational basis, but in some cases may be a more general measurement of the joint state. A measurement of a single qubit in the computational basis is denoted on a circuit diagram by a small triangle, as shown in Figure 4.1 (there are other symbols used in the literature, but we adopt this one). The triangle symbol will be modified for cases in which there is a need to indicate different types of measurements.R50
We characterize a model of universal quantum computation where the register (computational) qubits are controlled by ancillary qubits, using only a single fixed interaction between register and ancillary qubits. No additional access is required to the computational register and the dynamics of both the register and ancilla are unitary. This scheme is inspired by the measurement-based ancilla-driven quantum computation of Anders et al. [Phys. Rev. A 82, 020301(R) (2010)], but does not require measurements of the ancillas, and in this respect is similar to the original gate-based model of quantum computation. We consider what possible forms this ancilla-register interaction can take, with a proof that the interaction is necessarily locally equivalent to swap combined with an entangling controlled gate. We further show which Hamiltonians can create such interactions and discuss two examples; the two-qubit XY Hamiltonian and a particular case of the XXZ Hamiltonian. We then give an example of a simple, finite, and fault-tolerant gate set for universal quantum computation in this model.
Measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC) is a universal platform to realize unitary gates, only using measurements that act on a preprepared entangled resource state. By deforming the measurement bases, as well as the geometry of the resource state, we show that MBQC circuits always transmit and act on the input state but generally realize nonunitary logical gates. In contrast to the stabilizer formalism that is often used for unitary gates, we find that ZX-calculus is an ideal computation method for these nonunitary gates. As opposed to unitary gates, nonunitary gates cannot be applied with certainty, due to the randomness of quantum measurements. We maximize the success probability of realizing nonunitary gates and discuss applications including imaginary time evolution, which we demonstrate on a noisy intermediate-scale quantum device.
Fault-tolerant quantum computation fundamentally relies on encoding a logical qubit into a structured block of physical qubits, typically in the tens to hundreds. As a trade-off for improved fault-tolerance, logical gate operations will incur a linear overhead in terms of both the amount of time and quantum resources than before. For example, in monolithic quantum computing, performing a gate operation on two distant logical qubits will first require using a linear number of SWAP operations in order to move the logical qubits next to each other; while in distributed quantum computing, doing so will first require a linear number of ancilla qubits in order to form entanglement connections (or a logical Bell pair).
In this paper, we focus on significantly reducing the overhead involved in logical CNOT operations, a fundamental primitive. We propose NOBOL, a novel approach that requires only one Bell pair to perform a logical CNOT operation on two distant qubits encoded in arbitrary CSS codes. More importantly, NOBOL only requires performing gate operations on the logical X or Z operator subsets of the logical qubits. For many CSS codes, such as the surface code, these subsets are significantly smaller than the size of the code itself. In this paper, we describe various circuit realizations of NOBOL, including a depth-optimal circuit with logarithmic depth in terms of the size of the logical operators. Finally, we propose effective methods to contain error propagation without incurring much additional overhead.
Since NOBOL can be effectively applied to a wide range of quantum error-correcting (QEC) codes and, in addition, is agnostic to qubit modalities and effective for various architectures, including those based on either a monolithic QPU or distributed QPUs.
In quantum computation every unitary operation can be decomposed into quantum circuits---a series of single-qubit rotations and a single type entangling two-qubit gates, such as controlled-not(cnot) gates. Two measures are important when judging the complexity of the circuit: the total number of cnot gates needed to implement it and the depth of the circuit, measured by the minimal number of computation steps needed to perform it. Here we give an explicit and simple quantum circuit scheme for preparation of arbitrary quantum states, which can directly utilize any decomposition scheme for arbitrary full quantum gates, thus connecting the two problems. Our circuit reduces the depth of the best currently known circuit by a factor of 2. It also reduces the total number of cnot gates from 2n to 24232n in the leading order for even number of qubits. Specifically, the scheme allows us to decrease the upper bound from 11 cnot gates to 9 and the depth from 11 to 5 steps for four qubits. Our results are expected to help in designing and building small-scale quantum circuits using present technologies.